Shaw of Dublin: The Formative Years by B. C. Rosset (review)

1966 BOOK REVIEWS 453 What is required of commitment is clear. "That we were not at first supported may have, if you'll forgive the Puritanism, been good for us. It seeded the enterprise with an internal strength. The actors we did have all worked voluntarily. Irving and I did all the technical jobs. . . . Nobody drew any salary for several years..•• The pattern of sacrifice is not new in the theater. but the intensity and extent of it is relevant to my account of the period." In the second part of his work, Blau indicates major steps and decisions in the formulation of what the Workshop should be when all involved in the process attempted to clarify goals. Interesting as was the process, for this reviewer chapters seven, eight, and nine were most intriguing by virtue of the directorial interpretations discussed. Particularly memorable are the vivid and brilliant discussions of Genet's The Balcony and the storm scenes in King Lear. With the brilliance of perception, Blau also exhibits the wisdom of reservations. On Beckett, for example, while mastery is acknowledged, Blau is aware of the ease with which the theater could fall into the potential trap opened by the further generations of Absurdists. In short, these three chapters are worth the close attention of anyone interested in the modem drama. The defects are minor. There is, perhaps, too much richness in constant comparisons and analogies-to the Cold War in particular. The stylistic point became intrusive. Obviously a scholar, Blau's mortification at his mental lapse on Royall Tyler's play should be appeased by the realization that every Democrat will forgive him. There is a resemblance 'between President Eisenhower and Colonel Manly. The price of the book is unfortunate; many young artists to whom this work is addressed will not have the ten dollars. It is to he hoped that libraries will see that this book is made accessible. The Impossible Theatre will be to this generation what Clurman's The Fervent Years was to his. Indeed, it may well be far more lasting in its impact. WILLIAM R. REARDoN The University of Kansas SHAW OF DUBLIN: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, by B. C. Rosset, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, 388 pp. Price $7.50. Massively and indefatigably researched, B. C. Rosset's Shaw of Dublin is undoubtedly a major contribution to biographical studies of Shaw, one that no Shavian will want to ignore-at least on the level of fact. For here at last are the documented facts about Shaw's immediate family, his infancy, boyhood, and adolescence in mid-nineteenth century Dublin, and his impoverished young manhood in London. And here, too, are the documented facts, such as they are, about the relationship between Shaw's mother and George John Vandeleur Lee, the offbeat musical "genius" (Shaw's term for him) who was so curious a part of the Shaw family during the period of the menage Ii trois at 1 Hatch Street in Dublin and Torca Cottage in Dalkey (1866-1873). But if Rosset's book is an almost ideal illustration of how a biographer ferrets out factual data about his subject and how he turns into highly readable form masses of precise and semi-precise detail, it is also an astonishing example of how a biographer can ,Obdurately misinterpret the wealth of facts he has unearthed . Rosset's principal thesis, which I regret to say I find utterly preposterous, is that Shaw was seriously questioning his paternity about the time he left Ireland for London in 1876. Was George Carr Shaw his natural, as well as his legal, father; or was Lee his natural father? These questions Rosset asks 454 MODERN DRAMA February on the supposition that the menage Ii trois was the result, not just of the close professional relations between Lee and Mrs. Shaw, as Shaw insisted to the day of his death, but of a sexual liaison enjoyed by the two of them during the first four years of Mrs. Shaw's marriage (1852'1856) and prior to Shaw's birth in November, 1856. Shaw, so Rosset infers, either suspected as much or actually knew about it and spent a long...